[-empyre-] Response to Artwork #2 - Bill Santen "Dark Green"

[Maia Conran]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--I missed the bit where the decision to move to the country was taken. Shame, 
because I enjoyed the transition from flat to the city and especially enjoyed 
the time in the flat.

I used to teach a seminar on Murnau’s classic Sunrise -  A Song of Two Humans, 
it won’t leave me alone as I think about this woman’s return to nature. 
Somehow, it’s a very city thing to do to move into nature starting with an 
outfit design. Brilliantly City.


This woman blows Murnau’s typically patriarchal approach out of the water. It’s 
still a love story but for a planet maybe or a cause, the country still wins, 
the city once she joins it is dangerous and complex and yes, she starts with an 
outfit.


It seems an appropriate foil to a comparison with the patriarchal history of 
film that she worries that the filmmaker might feel taken advantage of.


I like the pace, the evident and slow process of filming, the time as she lives 
though a cold winter in her flat, and the punchy speeches.   


There’s the fabulous scene in Sunrise where during a country tryst, the city 
appears in sky surrounded by the mists of the marshy country. I imagine similar 
mist around thought bubbles appearing above the head of our protagonist. What 
would they contain?


 …Maybe it’s appropriate that it’s a film without spoken dialogue which I’m 
most reminded of in a discussion around voice.  


Maia Conran
www.maiaconran.com



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[-empyre-] Response to Artwork #2 - Bill Santen "Dark Green"

[Helena Haimes]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--- Who is this woman addressing? Who does she think her audience is?

- Is this scripted? Acted? Staged? Or is she a 'real' subject...I assume
these questions are intentionally left hazy. She certainly seems, or is
made to seem, as if she has a good degree of control over the filming
process (saying 'cut' at the end of scenes etc.)

-  She says: "I want to apologise if you think I'm exploiting you to make
my point, but I really need to do this and I couldn't do it without you" –
The plot grows thicker! Smashing exploration/subversion/confusion of the
artist-subject relationship

- It makes me think of an extremely renegade You Tube how-to video...now
*that's* an influencer

- Artist-wise, this definitely has a whiff of Marcus Coates about it

- Interrogating/toying with/deconstructing the idealised American wilderness

- *The Country and The City* by everyone's favourite Welsh cultural theorist,
Raymond Williams, has definite resonance here... “The contrast of the
country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of
a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society”

-- 
Journalist and Critical Writer
*www.helenahaimes.co.uk *
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